‘I hate this new Pope. He’s a hypocrite’
John Waters, master of trash cinema, tells Duncan White about his new memoir, the mayhem of his film sets, and Catholicism
In 1972, film director John Waters achieved notoriety with Pink Flamingos, a movie in which a couple crush a chicken to death while having sexual intercourse and which culminates with Divine, the drag queen star, eating dog faeces. It is not, you might imagine, the ideal foundation for going mainstream but here he is, at 73, an American icon, asked to give commencement addresses at colleges, the subject of a retrospective by the British Film Institute and, in the most accurate barometer of respectability, has even appeared in an episode of The Simpsons. The Pope of Trash, as WS Burroughs called him, has been canonised by the establishment. “I started out with bad reviews and getting arrested, and now I have the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government,” he said.
Baltimore-raised Waters has taken anything but a conventional path. His outrageous films attracted a devoted fan base and his distinctive look – tall, gaunt, impeccably dressed, pencil moustache – made him a celebrity.
It was in 1988 that he really crossed over into the mainstream, with the surprise hit Hairspray, a musical set in the Sixties about a plus-size teenager, played by a young Ricki Lake, who pursues a career as a dancer on a local TV station, and ends up advocating racial integration. “It snuck into deep
mid-america,” Waters said. “It plays in every school. Racists like Hairspray! Which is the most ludicrous thing. I have never heard anyone bitch about it being in schools even though it has two men singing a love song and tells your daughters to date black guys. No one gets upset – because it’s joyous. It’s not preachy.” The musical adaptation of Hairspray ran for nearly seven years on Broadway and won multiple awards. “I made more money on that than anything else!”
This journey to unlikely respectability is the subject of his new book, Mr Know-it-all: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. It tells the story of how he managed to start making movies in Hollywood, including Hairspray, and Cry-baby (1990). But the book is so much more than that. Framed as a kind of guide for the aspirant transgressive, it soon moves into conceptual essays that include meditations on drugs (“I think I’ve tried almost every one”), sex (“S&M looks silly at the beach”), and a punctuation-free riff on Andy Warhol. It’s a riot.
I went to see Waters in Provincetown, at the very end of Cape Cod. He has spent every summer for the past 55 years here. “It’s an art colony so it attracted lunatics, beatniks, drug addicts, rich people, gay people. It hasn’t changed all that much, maybe just got a little fancy. You get families visiting to take pictures of their kids posing with drag queens. It’s an odd mix.”
One of the joys of Mr Know-it-all is finding out what happened on the set of those movies. “Every movie I made it is a miracle that it got finished. The things you have to go through! I’d never written about the later movies before, so I thought it was time. Some people don’t like them as much. But that’s how it goes. Whenever I see Damien Hirst we always joke: ‘I like your earlier stuff.’ If your career lasts long enough, everyone hears that. I think they are better movies! I write about what really happened, which is not at all what people imagine. I think I was pretty honest about it: I failed upwards.” It’s true, despite each movie making a loss, Waters got given bigger budgets to make another. Such is the logic of Hollywood.
The making of Cry-baby, a musical set in the Fifties, was particularly action-packed. Johnny Depp, in his first film role, asked Waters if he would marry him and his girlfriend Winona Ryder. He refused. “His lawyers got me ordained,” he said. “I just told them they were too young to get married.”
The cast featured a freshly sober Iggy Pop who had to play almost every scene with a plastered Susan Tyrrell, as well as the celebrity kidnap victim Patty Hearst and the former porn star Traci Lords, who was served on set by the FBI, who wanted her to testify against the mob. According to Waters, Ricki Lake lost her virginity during the shoot and Tyrrell had an affair with one of the teamsters.
Waters is warm about not just the actors he has worked with but also the executives whom he coaxed into giving him money. “I praise them in the book and that’s only fair. Sure, I fought with them, don’t get me wrong – but ultimately they said ‘yes’ and gave me the money to make these crazy movies.” He can, of course, be waspish. The film censors get a lashing. “I hate the liberal ones, they’re smart. I much prefer the dumb ones.” Then there is Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, a figure who Waters revels in teasing. “I got more publicity from her not inviting me to the ‘Camp’ Met Gala than anything else. I didn’t have to spend the money to actually go to the ball and was in every article about it. I don’t think she likes me much. And I’m not against her but I just don’t think she’s funny. What has she ever done that’s funny?”
While Waters is mostly playful in tone, when it comes to the Catholic Church (in which he was raised), he reveals a harder edge. “They have been bashing my beliefs for centuries,” he said. “I’m happy to bash back. I hate this new Pope. He’s a hypocrite. When it comes to gay marriage, how can he say, ‘Who am I to judge?’ You’re the f------ pope! You are supposed to be infallible. I bash them because they bash us. They are the enemy. Unashamedly.” Conversely, he professes great admiration for the Satanic Temple who, among other actions, stage “pink masses” in which they turn gay the spirits of evangelical preachers.
“I love them. I had their leader over for dinner recently, he’s a good friend. What they are doing is real activist work on the separation of Church and State, something I violently believe in. They went to an anti-abortion rally recently all dressed as babies. They use humour to attack. That is something you British do better than us. Like that Trump balloon! Why can’t we have something like that?”
He is both fascinated and horrified by Trump. “I think there is nothing good about him. He used to be a liberal, used to be at Studio 54. I never ever liked him. Even back then he was vulgar. He’s even ruined camp. There is nothing about him I like. His hair? He’s like a white James Brown impersonator. On Liberace it was funny but on him? Please. Do you have a mirror? His enemy: the wind.” He waits a beat, before resuming in faux conspiratorial tones: “I believe it is just one long piece that is sculpted.”
These days Waters is still involved in many projects, including the punk rock festival he curates in Oakland, his spoken word tours, his Christmas stand-up show, and the summer camp he hosts for his “super fans” (one wonders).
“You have to stay in touch with your audience. I’m lucky enough to keep getting the next generation. That’s why I have to keep my street cred up by doing these stunts. That’s why I took LSD at 70 for this book. What stunt can I do next? Turn heterosexual? That’s the only
thing left!”
‘Every movie I made it is a miracle that it got finished. The things you have to go through!’